WordPress + PWAs

One of the sessions from the Chrome Dev Summit, hosted by Das Surma and Daniel Walmsley. It’s not so much about WordPress as it is about CMS powered sites that aren’t really “apps”, if there is such a thing, and the possibility of turning that site into a Progressive Web AppSite.

I find the CMS + PWA combo interesting because:

If you aren’t stoked about AMP, and let’s face it, a lot of people are not stoked about AMP, but do like the idea of a super fast website, a PWA is likely of high interest. Whereas AMP feels like you’re making an alternate version of your site, PWAs feel like you’re making the website you have much better.

Some PWA work is generic and easy-ish (use HTTPS) and some PWA is bespoke and hard (make the site work offline). For lack of a better way to explain it, CMS’s know about themselves in such a way that they can provide tooling to make PWAs way easier. For example, Jetpack just doing it for you. It’s the same kind of thing we saw with responsive images. It’s not trivial to handle by hand, but a CMS can just do it for you.

Google wants you to build PWAs, reduce JavaScript file size, use Web Components, and configure autofill. They announced only a handful of features around payments, authentication, Android Trusted Web Activities, Chrome Dev Tools, and the Chrome User Experience Report.